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BERLIN — Swiss voters rejected a plan to accelerate the country’s exit from nuclear energy in a referendum Sunday, turning down an initiative that would have forced their government to shut the last plant in 2029.
The plan promoted by the Green party would have meant closing three of Switzerland’s five nuclear plants next year. Polls ahead of the referendum had shown a tight race, but voters shot down the initiative by 54.2 per cent to 45.8 per cent.

A Japanese construction company is proposing to solve the energy problems facing Japan, and ultimately the entire planet, by turning the Moon into a solar power plant.
Shimizu Corp, which is based in Tokyo, wants to lay a belt of solar panels 350 kilometres wide around the equator of the Moon and relay the resulting constant supply of energy to “receiving stations” on Earth by laser or microwave transmission.

Associated Press/Issei KatoSix years have passed since the Fukushima nuclear disaster on March 11, 2011, but Japan is still dealing with its impacts.
Decommissioning the damaged Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant poses unprecedented technical challenges.

KOLKATA: India may be heading for a huge surplus of generation capacity because the 300 million people who don't have access to electricity also don't have the means to buy power from new plants that are being set up to meet Prime Minister Narendra Modi's vision of power for all, experts said. The government said it intends to expand power generation capacity about three-fold to 800 gigawatts by 2030 and to fuel this, it is targeting coal production of 1.5 billion tonnes a year by 2020. Early signs of an impending demandsupply mismatch have already started to appear, according to experts.

NEW DELHI: Some of India's biggest solar equipment makers are facing financial collapse, priced out by Chinese competitors as Prime Minister Narendra Modi's government prioritises cheap power over local manufacturing despite his 'Make in India' push. Though President Donald Trump is pulling the United States out of the Paris accord on climate change, India is sticking to its huge renewable energy programme. That has created a multi-billion-dollar market for Chinese solar product makers, who are facing an overcapacity at home and steep duties in Europe.

Solar developers in Spain are trying to build Europe’s first large-scale plants to sell electricity at market prices, taking advantage of a crash in equipment costs and some of the continent’s highest levels of sunlight.
Builders have sought permits to connect 37.5 gigawatts of utility-sized projects to Red Electrica Corp. SA’s transmission grid, company spokeswoman Susana Moreno said. While demand studies show that’s far more new generation than the country needs, the first few plants could set a commercial precedent.

Following the Fukushima nuclear facility disaster in March 2011, uranium miners were quick to rationalize that the fundamentals of their business were unlikely to change and the world still needed more nuclear power.
They were wrong, to put it kindly.

While the immediate focus in Japan in the aftermath of the earthquake and subsequent tsunami is on the safety of the population, businesses worldwide that rely on supplies such as the precision electronic co